DriveTime Transforms IT Infrastructure With EMC VMAX

EMC Corporation announced that DriveTime, the nation’s largest integrated car sales and financing company focused on customers with credit issues, is transforming its IT infrastructure with EMC Symmetrix VMAX enterprise storage systems and EMC Backup and Recovery Solutions to manage and protect its 90% virtualized VMware environment.

Customer Benefits:

• Performance – EMC VMAX has provided increased performance and stability of DriveTime’s VMware virtual environment.
• Scalability – With the addition of EMC VMAX, DriveTime is able to scale to meet its data center needs as it expands its business.
• Maintenance – DriveTime is able to spend less time on storage maintenance with EMC VMAX compared to its previous HP storage environment and more time on proactive IT projects.
• Disaster Recovery – EMC VMAX coupled with EMC RecoverPoint technology, and VMware, has improved disaster recovery capabilities and decreased recovery time by over 50%.

Customer Challenge and Solution
DriveTime was experiencing rapid growth and performance challenges with its HP storage environment. Lacking the ability to scale as it expanded, DriveTime required a new, enterprise-class storage solution for its environment-complete with VMware integration. DriveTime’s well-established VMware environment, including VMware View, VMware vSphere and VMware Site Recovery Manager tools, required an enterprise storage solution capable of supporting its aggressive virtualization strategy-with the ability to scale and perform as the company grows.

DriveTime selected EMC VMAX because of its enterprise performance, reliability and scalability. DriveTime also implemented EMC Avamar to backup its expanding VMware environment.

EMC Avamar has allowed DriveTime to accelerate their VMware backups and recoveries while slowing backup storage growth by leveraging deduplication and tight integration with VMware.

Brad Beebe, Managing Director of IT, DriveTime, said: "At DriveTime we have been experiencing tremendous growth and are embarking on a major initiative to expand to new business opportunities while also increasing our current dealership and financing business. Our previous HP storage solution was struggling to handle our performance requirements as we grew. We needed a new solution that was reliable and could scale to meet our growing needs.

"We had been using VMware virtualization technologies for a while and as we moved along on our cloud journey, we required an enterprise-class storage solution that is tightly integrated with our VMware infrastructure. EMC’s shared vision and industry-leading integration with VMware were key factors in our decision making."

Shane Allen, IT Manager of Infrastructure Services, DriveTime, said: "EMC is the backbone to our infrastructure. I don’t have to worry about performance or being able to grow to meet business needs any more. I know that with EMC VMAX we have the most powerful, trusted and smart enterprise storage solution for our environment.

"With EMC Avamar we’ve been able to put a lot of data into a very small space compared to our previous tape-based backup approach. We are seeing a 30:1 reduction in backup storage requirements, our VMware backups are incredibly fast, and restore flexibility is unmatched. It’s been a very reliable component of our infrastructure."